July 27, 1999

MOOD MUSIC, OR HOW WE LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

It's a jungle out there. It's also an island, a gauzy midnight park, a lush garden, a pounding dance floor, a storm of violins, a haunted forest, a ruined temple in the moonlight. It's a world that's both familiar and unfamiliar, that exists yet doesn't exist. It's a world where the spirit of foreign climes comes to roost in American hi-fi sets.

It's a dead world. But its rising again.

It's the world of mood music, or exotica, or space-age pop, or island pop - pick a subgenre. It's a strain of musical culture that was generated by scores of musicians and studio wizards and album-cover artists and the flimsily-gowned "native" girls the artists used as models.

From around the close of World War II until the early '70s, when drug-fueled rock music decisively took over the imaginations and pocketbooks of listening America, music and visual artists produced thousands of LPs designed to lull consumers into dreams of romance, adventure, the future, the past - anything but the humdrum present.

"People had a dream that became evident in the '5Os," says Jennifer McKnight-Tronz, author of "Exotiquarium" (St. Martin's, $24.95). "They were starting to learn about the world, but they were too naive to know their dream was narrow-minded. So it took the form of 'Hawaiian' music or 'Oriental' music that really wasn't."

"Exotiquarium" is an irresistible book containing much information on musical artists as diverse yet almost interchangeable as Martin Denny, 'Yma Sumac, Montovani (he of the strings), Ferrante & Teicher, Arthur Lyman, Leo Addeo and His Orchestra, Danny Stewart and His Orchestra, Hal Aloma and the Hawaiian Orchestra, The Markko Polo Adventurers - the list is endless.

McKnight-Tronz writes about the countless LPs such artists recorded, with titles like "Cha Cha Cha's for Lovers," "Manhattan Latin," "Carnival Tropicana," "The Sounds of Exotic Island," "Sea of Dreams," "Strings for a Space Age," "Music for Dreaming," and “Music for Daydreaming."

Most interestingly, the book includes reproductions of the album art that formed a kind of hallucinatory backdrop to the culture of that time.

The images range from extreme gemutlichkelt to pseudo-French impressionism to steamy, bosom-heaving cheesecake. The one thing they have in common is that they are pictures of a fantasy world that Americans not only had never seen but that didn't exist.

"After World War II, a lot of musicians were captivated by the sounds they associated with foreign cultures," McKnight-Tronz says. "They were curious about these cultures but not sophisticated. They weren't seriously looking at them, they were making it into what they wanted it to be."

Although that world vanished from the cultural and commercial radar decades ago, it has reached a phantom tendril through to our own time. Modern recording acts like Combustible Edison and Stereo lab draw their inspiration largely from those febrile soundscapes of yore, and music consumers galvanized by a renewed appreciation of swing, beatnik, and Rat Pack cultures and a comfortable home within the music of mood.

It is all terribly quaint, of course. But where did it really come from?

Perhaps it's worth noting that an entire segment of the mood phenomenon - island/Hawaiian music and its countless offshoots - arrived by way of American servicemen's experience in the South Pacific during World War II. That's the same war that brought us the never-ending threat of nuclear annihilation and the hard-to-assimilate memory of the Holocaust.

During the time these albums were most popular, neither of those two topics was much discussed. Comedians made jokes about bomb shelters, but no one outside of history class ever said more than a word or two about all those innocent victims of the Final Solution. There were no widely-read books on the subject, and no movies. None appeared until the '70s were almost over.

So maybe it's no more than understandable that Americans would seek release from such unacknowledged tension in the surf and steam of faux Latin/island/space age orchestral stylings.

McKnight-Trontz puts it succinctly: "It's music for people who were just trying very, very hard to relax."

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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